Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution, by Richard M. Ketchum. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.
The American Revolutionary War began and ended with the beating of a drum. On 19 April 1775, twenty-year-old William Diamond used one of these martial instruments to summon the Minutemen to the Battle of Lexington. Six and a half years later another young drummer, this one a British soldier, climbed up on a mound of earthworks in Virginia and beat a call that signaled Lieutenant General (Lord) Charles Cornwallis’s request for a truce at Yorktown. The surrender of this British army created a “World Turned Upside Down”: the strongest military power of the day had been defeated by its upstart colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. American independence, and the democratic Constitutional government that followed it, changed the course of human history.
Richard M. Ketchum’s Victory at Yorktown details the story of this crucial battle. Ketchum also has published several other campaign histories of the War for American Independence, including The Battle for Bunker Hill (1962), The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (1973), and Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (1997). All of these books feature lively prose and interesting narration.
Another of Ketchum’s long suits is characterization, and in Yorktown he develops a compelling portrait of his central figure, General George Washington. The author clearly admires this founding leader and strongly agrees with another historian, James Thomas Flexner, that the Virginia surveyor, planter, and soldier was America’s “indispensable man.” General Washington demonstrated no genius for tactics or strategy—although his war-winning success in the Yorktown campaign raised his standing as a strategist. His contribution to victory, instead, lay in his ability to keep an army in the field and to sustain a Patriot war effort that, throughout the conflict, tottered perilously near collapsing. Faced with powerful British armies and fleets and with disheartening obstacles on the home front, Washington never faltered in his determination to win American independence.
What can twenty-first century airmen learn from an eighteenth century land and naval campaign? First, Yorktown offers some useful lessons in joint warfare. The ability of the allies to control the York River was essential to Washington’s victory; without it, the British navy could have rescued Lord Cornwallis’s besieged army at any time. Yorktown also carries lessons in coalition warfare, at more than one level. On the surface, the operations of the French army proved important—and those of the French fleet vital—to the American cause. At a deeper level, Ketchum shows that tensions disturbed the Yankee-Bourbon coalition, just as they would every alliance that the United States would enter during the next two hundred years and more.
Above all, Ketchum’s Yorktown underscores the importance of leadership. The British high command failed in this regard; its opponent succeeded. George Washington provided strong, determined leadership at a time when the emerging American republic desperately needed it.
Reviewed by Dr. Perry D. Jamieson, Senior Historian, Air Force Historical Studies Office, Washington, D.C.